Mobile Junkie IV: Oregon Postcards

Moe's Recipe for Martinis
1/2 oz vermouth (white, dry)
7 1/2 oz vodka or gin (Ketel 1 vodka)
dirty: add about a tsp of olive juice

drawing by MJ

Georgia and I sat in a restaurant called Pier 101 and I sipped a martini, realizing that no drink would ever meet my expectations. No drink would ever give me more personality, more beauty, more fun, more communion. My problem was the experience that I thrived always transcended happiness. I was looking for the real to become surreal. Working in Yellowstone National Park for a summer after graduating from college showed me how fantastically unreal reality can be. But it wasn't
grandeur that I was after. I was after the spectacular nature of a more commonplace kind, the kind people overlook. I read a book once by a man who hiked the populated and unwanted places of the world, through suburban parking lots and busy city campgrounds, and he found unusual stories there. Sipping my martini, I looked around the restaurant, wondering what stories were being acted out there that night.

Do you believe in destiny? I searched faces, wondering why we were brought to that particular restaurant in that particular instant, but came up void. Our waiter, politely aloof, obviously couldn't wait to join his life wherever it was happening. We were of no interest to him. Real estate agents in the next booth energetically strategized their next conquest and critiqued their fellow employees. A family sat loosely around a large table, picking at the remnants of their much-too-large meals. Dad disconnected, mom quiet, kids raggedly moving further out from the edge of the circle. Oregon had become much too connected to Georgia and Theo in my mind. Rats. Spotty reception. Poverty and MS, blue collar and oceanfront property, grandeur and clearcut, patronizing young waiters and the absence of native people. I ask Georgia, "do you ever see Native American Indians"? "No," she says, and we go back to our separate meals. Georgia has gone inside, into her own world.

I look for a bathroom, and Georgia and I laugh at the sexy poster of a young shirtless Brad Pitt facing us from the wall inside. Alone in the stall I pull up my pants and suddenly panic, hovering in that place between hope and despair when I realize my pocket is empty. "My cell phone must have dropped into the booth." Georgia looks at me as I race out of the bathroom through the bar and back into the restaurant to run my hands over the plastic seats and the dirty floor. I am thinking that I need a flashlight! I need more light, but already I can feel that the phone is gone. I head out into the night, toward the car, but no friendly phone waits for me in the seat, on the floor, wedged by the door, as in earlier times. I go back into the restaurant toward the bathroom and as I pass the bar I say to the bartender, "I lost my cell phone, I think maybe in the booth." She reaches into the shelves above her head and brings down my phone. "Somebody found it in the parking lot. I sent you a message," she smiles.

Back in the car, heading down the road toward Newport, I check my e-mail.

Thu, 22 Jul 2004 01:11:11 EDT

Hi Theo. AJ just called from NYC saying she just received a call from a woman who was using MJ's cell phone. This woman was going through MJ's list of phone numbers with hopes of getting the message to her that her phone was at Pier 101 in Lincoln City. AJ thinks Georgia has a cell but I don't have her number. MJ must be freaking--she's lost without that thing.

Anyway, thanks. I hope you can get the message to her. Sorry to miss you during your last visit to Michigan. Let's kill the fatted calf next time you come through.

Steven

The next day, when we reach Bandon, I head down to the beach and walk far far down, looking at the huge rocks that rest on the beach and out in the ocean. They are covered with bird shit. I tell Georgia that birds flying from the mouth of face rock look like an outpouring of words. Georgia says it is always too cold to swim here, but it doesn't feel too cold to me. I am thankful for the evening alone and I pick up stones and remnants of shells and sand dollars. I put them in my jacket pockets, and I am happy that sand is everywhere, in my pockets, on my feet, on the floor of our room. The beach is full with sargasso, tunneling into the sand like big snakes. I walk up to a transparent jelly fish with the most beautiful violet circles delicately bordering its center. I sit on the beach, lie down, sleep and wake again. Twenty horses trot down the shoreline close to the water.

Tomorrow we would drive all the way to Seaside, a town whose strange mix of American Graffiti, carnival, juvenile delinquency and tourism was to bring a close to my time with Georgia. We grew irritated with one another. "It is late. We can't keep looking for the "right" motel room." I was getting on Georgia's nerves, and later we tried to enjoy our burgers in the restaurant across the street from the carousel, but the mood was dour. Georgia had Theo and her job to think about, and I was escaping early. Georgia would take me to the Portland airport in the morning and she would go home to her little house, her dog and cat, her landscaped front yard, and Theo.

I was irritated. "Don't take any abuse," I said as Georgia dropped me off at the airport. She had begun easing into her world, and made mention of the new car that Theo would buy for her. I wanted to scream and yell at her, but tried to remind myself that we all have our own level of tolerance and she needed to find hers. I hoped she didn't withdraw and ignore the bullshit. Like AJ says, she deserves better than that. "Will he be contrite or angry?" I asked? "We'll see," she said.

My phone rang as I handed my boarding pass to the woman at the gate. "Contrite," said Georgia. My phone broke up as I walked into the tunnel leading to the plane.

Later, back in Michigan, my cell phone trilled and I looked to find an e-mail from Georgia!

Tue, 27 Jul 2004 18:31:22 -0700

It doesn't feel like World War III; so I guess it isn't. 

Work has just CONSUMED me in the last few days.  I have been working non-stop since I got home and need to finish about three more major projects.  I have to somehow find time to look at the house with Theo in it and decide some things.  Right now it doesn't feel like an emergency and I will find a counselor although I don't know how I'll do going to anyone regularly.  Sometimes I worry that I can't do anything over time. 

I miss you tons and wish we lived closer together.  I love you

Georgia

Mobile Junkie III: Oregon Postcards

Mount St. Helens
drawing by MJ

Georgia's boyfriend had been freaking out and alienating people for quite some time, but the total picture was lost to me. Hey, I was the tolerant one who accepted people for who they were, faults and all, just like Georgia. But the Day of the Rats changed all that.

I've got to admit, there were signs that should have tipped me off. When Theo visited Dolly (our mother) with Georgia, he picked on Dolly continually. Her coffee was undrinkable, her house needed to be cooler, her food wasn't good enough. "I know what I like!" he would proclaim, followed by a loud HA HA HA, as if he were kidding. Dolly had visited Georgia and Theo once and came back with stories of Theo's anxiety when the basement flooded. She told Theo that "he didn't have to take it out on her," which, if you knew Dolly, who took 40-some years of abuse from her husband and avoided conflict at all cost, was a brave thing to do.

The day I arrived in Portland Georgia and Theo took me out to dinner, and Theo became irate when our meals took too long to arrive. He stuck out his lower lip and pouted when he found that Georgia had eaten all of her fish and there was none left for him. I was surprised to hear him make fun of gay men. What became the most telling incident, though, was when we arrived home on that first night and were entering the front door. Their big dog greeted us at the door and we were all sort of jammed half way in when Theo tried to shut the obviously unshuttable door, scraping it against Georgia's back. When she said, "Ouch!" he barked, "Well, come in! MJ isn't that big!"

But all of these incidents paled for a time because the next day, the second day of my visit, The Day of the Rats began. That morning Georgia said in hushed tones that she hadn't told Theo, but she thought she had seen a rat in their back yard. Later that afternoon when she arrived home from work and I reported seeing not one but two rats in the yard, we conspired together to buy some traps and kill the rats ourselves. Weighing the pros and cons of poison, live traps and old-fashioned spring traps (let alone the ethical and spiritual implications of killing an animal), we settled on the spring kind, and went straight to Fred Meyer's and bought two of them. Filling them with cheese, we gingerly set them in strategic spots in the yard, quietly tip-toed back into the house and straightaway caught two rats! We refilled the traps triumphantly and when Theo got home Georgia casually mentioned that she had seen a rat in the yard and that we had caught two of them.

At that moment Theo snapped. "Where did they come from?" He repeated this for a while as he began his verbal whipping of Georgia: "Why didn't you tell me? We will never be able to sell the house." He paced out into the back yard, peered down at the traps, paced into the house, repeated his questions over and over. "Where did they come from?" Where did they come from?" My attempts at snapping him out of it , "Who cares where they came from?" "We are taking care of it! We are getting rid of the rats!" just egged him on. "Why didn't you tell me?" "We will never be able to sell the house." Luckily I had a bedroom with a door that closed for escape, but Theo was going to be home the next day, so I asked Georgia to drop me off at Powell's City of Books on her way to work.

Powell's was an oasis in the tumult of Theo. I spent five hours browsing current affairs, eastern religion, gay and lesbian writing, global writing, graphic novels, literature, metaphysics, travel writing, independently published books, art, islam, current events, politics...I got lost in the titles, in the pages, I let my mind brood over the events of the past couple of days. I bought coffee and sat by the window in the coffee shop, trying to process this journey, what this "vacation" had become, what I was supposed to learn from this experience, what I was supposed to "bring" to Portland. Theo had a weakness in that he couldn't deal with things that he couldn't "fix", according to Georgia. His upbringing in the Bronx, in a "hard" neighborhood, had become sort of a cloak of forgiveness for all of his idiosyncratic behaviors. Who was I to criticize him in his own home? Georgia loves him, and she knows him better than me. I felt a softening, an acceptance of Theo as part of the family, quirks and all.

I had an idea. A few weeks earlier I watched an author speak on TV about a book he had written called Rats. He had studied a group of rats in New York City and was taken by how similar their behavior was to ours, and he came away from his experience with great respect for them. I would buy the book as a gift for Theo, and it would raise our consciousness about rats and help dispel the negative vibes in the house. The rats would be a bonding experience between the three of us. I waited on the corner for Georgia to pick me up, happy with my purchase. What a cool book!

That evening Theo took the book from me, glanced at it and threw it down onto a pile of newspapers and books in anger. He then proceeded to ignore me for two days. I tentatively spoke to Georgia about it. "I guess people really don't want to change their perspective." "No, they don't," said Georgia. That night Georgia and Theo took the dog for a walk and I could hear Theo yelling at Georgia a block away. Later Georgia tells me that Theo says I was mean to him and how does she expect him to act? Their yelling continues into the house and into Theo's study and I come out of my bedroom hideaway, my heart beating out of my chest, ready to defend Georgia from her crazy man. Theo begins a new tact with Georgia. "Don't you hit me! Don't you look like you are going to hit me!

I meander, phone to my ear, around Georgia's neighborhood with its tiny houses with landscaped front yards, fenced-in back yards and dogs everywhere. People here love dogs. As I walk I talk to Moe about her boyfriend misery and she listens as I tell her the story of Portland so far. "It feels just like the midwest, except it has healthy alternative communities and people are nice." I talk with AJ, who loyally says, "Theo is an asshole. Georgia is too good for him, mom." Huck tells me about his new guitar and the girl in his life, and I tell him about Georgia's bawdy retired friend across the street who has no use for men! She called me over earlier as I roamed down the middle of the street talking on my phone and asked conspiratorially, "How's World War III? Theo's just a baby. Hell! There are rats everywhere around here! One was face-to-face with my dog this morning in the back yard and it was as big as the dog!"

Theo is leaving in the morning, we just need to get through a few hours of agony and tomorrow afternoon Georgia and I will head for the coast.

Mobile Junkie II: Oregon Postcards

We Made It to the Pacific
Mobile Photo by MJ

My phone works intermittently and I feel that we are leaving civilization behind as we drive south on the Oregon coast. I pull it out of my pocket again: "No network", I say tartly to Georgia. I have been in close contact with Moe and AJ and Huck, my oldest son, these past few days, through various dramas, mostly concerning Georgia's "mate" and Moe's live-in. Of course AJ needs money! She calls from the train station sometimes, with urgent pleas for subway fare. It is not easy to be an 18 year old dancer in New York City. I feel the futility of lost contact, like a morse code operator frantically tapping out his message on a doomed ocean liner. My unsent message folder fills to capacity as I stare at my phone's empty display.

The sun was setting when Georgia pulled into the first scenic turnout overlooking the Pacific. I took a picture with my phone, which looked like "an oil spill at Jiffy Lube" according to Steven, who had given me the directive to "not send him any messages while I was gone". Perhaps he wanted us to miss each other, or maybe he just wanted to be left alone. We never have been able to communicate, and I never have been able to obey. The grandeur had begun.

"This is ridiculous," lamented Georgia. We drove down the coast in the dark. "We should stop now and drive tomorrow, when we can see the ocean." So Georgia and I peered at the occasional roadside outpost, looking for a cheap and cheerful motel. Unable, even after backtracking 20 miles, to find such a place, we checked in at the Newport Motor Inn, which was a good contrast to the grandeur. Mixed with the abusive boyfriend drama in the background of our minds it added gritty realism to the search for self-transformation. It is so hard to love your fellow humans while staying in a dirty motel on an ugly commercial strip. Especially when your cell phone is not working. I placed the phone on the table beside the bed, as usual, and tried to imagine the bars fully green and tall, at full reception. Voices in the next room became angry and menacing. The lights from the parking lot (or was it a junk yard?) next door reached through the gold curtains into my head, even while I slept. I wonder if one can make 'a life without money' cheerful. Poverty has its claws in this coastline. The working class towns line the coast, with their 'historical' beachfronts as draws for the tourist bucks. In Lincoln City I saw a longhaired man wearing a tie-dyed t-shirt standing in front of a tattoo parlor and an aging waitress in Burger King gave us directions to the hospital in Coos Bay, where Georgia will meet with her Multiple Schlerosis Society people tomorrow.

In the morning even Newport is hopeful, and I am thrilled with the tiny drive-up expresso shops that sit in supermarket parking lots in towns along the coast. I order a tall almond latte (and am thankful that I am not forced to say the word "venti") and Georgia gets black coffee. We order two scones that we nibble as the scenery goes by and we think our separate thoughts. In Coos Bay we locate the hospital where Georgia will have her meeting later that night and we point out mountains of woodchips that line the road. We have noticed that the fringe of trees by the highway can't hide the clearcut behind. I pick up a copy of the "coffee break: Free Daily Morning News" in a grocery store when we arrive in Bandon and I find that it divulges many of our collective class secrets and desires.

Two barn owls that came to Free Flight as babies were released back in to the wild on North Bank Road this past weekend.

COME JOIN us at Jodella's this weekend for live tunes with Bill Bartels on Friday night and piano by Jack Ponting on Saturday night. Great music, delicious food, spectacular sunsets.

THE TEA Cosy needs a cook who loves to bake.

2 LOONS Deli is happy to announce acceptance of all major credit cards coming the last week in July.

PREMIER OCEANFRONT parcel. Stunning panoramic views! 100 ft of ocean frontage! $850,000.

WALLET FOUND by Table Rock Motel. Call to identify and claim.

MISSING TEETH causing you embarrassment or discomfort? Frustrated with a loose denture or partial? Call today for a free consultation.

MOLLY HERZIG: at noon Thursday in the Pedway, you will find 6 of your favorite things. Love, Brandy and Amy.

I notice among the "divorce/moving sales" and ads for "reliable and motivated housekeepers needed through the season", an announcement for a "PROPOSED CELL phone tower in City Park. Reminder: attend Planning Commission meeting at City Hall".

I am determined to enjoy our quaint motel by the ocean and later when Georgia leaves for her 25 mile drive back up to Coos Bay, I turn off my receptionless phone, place it in my pocket and head down the path to the beach.